Catholic University (Photo by Jeffrey Porter/ For The Washington Post)

Catholic educators are feuding over a $1 million gift that the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers have given to Catholic University in Washington D.C.

A tough letter, signed by 50 Catholic educators from across the country, says Catholic University should not have accepted a $1 million gift from the the right-wing Koch Brothers because they support “anti-government, Tea Party ideology” that “directly contradict Catholic teaching on a range of moral issues,” and that outsiders may think the school agrees with the Kochs. Catholic University officials issued a response that slammed the letter, calling it “an effort to manufacture controversy and score political points at the expense” of the school.

Here is the text of the letter (about which my Post colleague Michelle Boorstein wrote in this story). Below that is the text of Catholic University’s response, posted on its website:

Dear President Garvey and Dean Abela,

We congratulate you on the opening of a new business school at The Catholic University of America. This is an opportune time to educate students about the importance of business ethics and global solidarity. Both Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI have raised ethical and moral questions about global financial markets, and emphasize the need for preparing business leaders to not simply serve a profit motive but to serve the common good.

While we understand the challenges of starting a business school during a time of fiscal constraints and restrained philanthropic and government funding, we must raise our serious concerns about a recent $1 million gift the university has accepted from the Charles Koch Foundation. Given the troubling track record the foundation has in making gifts to universities that in some cases include unacceptable meddling in academic content and the hiring process of faculty, we urge you to be more transparent about the details of this grant. Charles and David Koch have an ideological agenda when it comes to shaping the national debate over economics and politics that is not simply academic in nature.

The Koch brothers are billionaire industrialists who fund organizations that advance public policies that directly contradict Catholic teaching on a range of moral issues from economic justice to environmental stewardship. As you well know, Catholic social teaching articulates a positive role for government, an indispensable role for unions, just tax policies, and the need for prudent regulation of financial markets in service of the common good. We are concerned that by accepting such a donation you send a confusing message to Catholic students and other faithful Catholics that the Koch brothers’ anti-government, Tea Party ideology has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops.

While the Koch brothers lobby for sweeping deregulation of industries and markets, Pope Francis has criticized trickle-down economic theories, and insists on the need for stronger oversight of global financial markets to protect workers from what he calls “the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”

As Catholic bishops affirm the rights of workers to collectively bargain and organize, the Koch brothers gave generously to Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who stripped public employee unions of their rights to bargain. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published by the Vatican, recognizes that unions are “an indispensable element of social life.” In their pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, Catholic bishops emphasized that the Church “fully supports the rights of workers to form unions and other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions….No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.”

While the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops advocates for Medicaid expansion, the Koch brothers’ primary political arm, Americans for Prosperity, has aggressively opposed Medicaid expansion in several states and demonized elected officials who support expansion that will improve the lives of the working poor, pregnant women, the disabled, and seniors in nursing homes. Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States, also has an abysmal environmental record.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a settlement with a Koch-affiliated group, Invista, in 2009 that required the company to pay a $1.7 million civil penalty and spend up to an estimated $500 million to correct environmental violations at facilities in seven states. In addition, Koch Industries funds an array of organizations that deny the reality of climate change, which the Vatican and many Catholic leaders around the world have made a central pro-life concern because of the disproportionate impact climate change has on the poor and most vulnerable.

The Koch Foundation does noble philanthropic work as a leading patron of arts and culture. We commend them for these charitable endeavors. However, we must not ignore the stark contrast between the Koch brothers’ public policy agenda and our Church’s traditional social justice teachings. In his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelli Gaudium, Pope Francis writes:

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation…To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. With this in mind, I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: ‘Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs.’ A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders.”

It is this “absolute autonomy of the marketplace” that Charles and David Koch are working to achieve. Our Catholic intellectual and social tradition offers an important critique of this vision. We look forward to a productive and civil dialogue with you both on how we can protect the integrity of our Church’s consistent ethic of life teachings.

The letter spearheaded by the organization Faith in Public Life is an unfortunate effort to manufacture controversy and score political points at the expense of The Catholic University of America.

The Catholic University of America has received a commitment of $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation and $500,000 from the Busch Family Foundation to support research into the role principled entrepreneurship should play in improving society’s well-being. The grant will enable the University’s School of Business and Economics to recruit and hire three visiting scholars from academia and one visiting scholar-practitioner from the business world.

The University controls the search, recruitment, and selection process for all positions funded in the agreement. The University will independently select all faculty and staff related to this grant in accordance with existing University hiring policies. All the activities funded in the grant are related to the core mission of the University to teach and conduct research in service to the Church and the nation.

The Faith in Public Life letter suggests that the University has not been transparent in disclosing details about the Charles Koch Foundation grant. This is puzzling. The University was happy to receive the grant and publicized notice of it in a Nov. 12 press release. It was posted on our website that day and has remained there since then.

The letter is presumptuous on two counts. First, its authors cast themselves as arbiters of political correctness regarding Charles Koch Foundation grants. They judge the Foundation’s support of the arts and culture to be “noble philanthropic work;” its underwriting of grants to universities elicits their “serious concerns.” Second they seek to instruct The Catholic University of America’s leaders about Catholic social teaching, and do so in a manner that redefines the Church’s teaching to suit their own political preferences. We are confident that our faculty and academic leadership are well versed in Catholic social teaching and well equipped to apply it. We created a school of business and economics for the express purpose of promoting respect for the human person in economic life, based on the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, human dignity, and the common good. The aim of the Charles Koch Foundation grant — to support research into principled entrepreneurship — is fully consonant with Catholic social teaching. On that point the letter’s authors are strangely silent.

The facts bear out a long record of involvement in higher education by the Charles Koch Foundation, without any serious claim of interference with recipients of their funds. For more than three decades the Charles Koch Foundation has been a 501(c) (3) charitable organization (prohibited by law from directly or indirectly participating in political activities). According to its website it currently provides support to more than 270 universities nationwide, including Brown, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern. Twenty-five Catholic colleges and universities, in addition to The Catholic University of America, are on that list. Among the 50 signatories to the Faith in Public Life letter are 15 individuals who list affiliations with colleges and universities that receive Charles Koch Foundation support (San Francisco, Loyola/New Orleans, Notre Dame, Dayton, Duquesne, Villanova, Holy Cross). So widespread and, on balance, non-controversial has been the Foundation’s support for higher education that we wonder whether the 15 signatories realized, before they endorsed the letter, that their institutions are “guilty” of the same association they chastise The Catholic University of America for. And if they were aware of this, we wonder why they apply a different standard to The Catholic University of America than they do to their own institutions.

The grant has not engendered any controversy on our campus. No students, faculty, or staff members have contacted either President John Garvey or Dean Andrew Abela to express concern. Nor has the University’s Board of Trustees voiced any reservations; in fact one of them is working closely with Dean Abela on the grant. The negative attention to the grant has all been externally driven by organizations with a political agenda. Nearly two weeks after the University publicly announced the grant, an organization called Faithful America launched a petition drive in opposition. Faithful America appears to be an affiliate of Faith in Public Life, the organizer of the letter. In recent weeks Faithful America has also launched three separate petition drives against one Catholic bishop and two Catholic cardinals. All have been characterized by harsh, simplistic, and one-sided rhetoric. As for Faith in Public Life, it is telling that after a two-week-long effort to recruit faculty support at Catholic University, it was able to muster the signatures of only three professors, less than one half of one percent of the University’s faculty.

The Catholic University of America welcomes constructive input from all who share an interest in advancing and supporting its mission. It has no intention of revisiting its decision to accept the grant from the Charles Koch Foundation.

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